Pristine Trading

Pristine Trading

Honesty

Quality

Cost

Support

Verified Trades

User Experience

1.8

Summary

A stocks day trading room that is moderated by nice folks, but not much of a track record. They claim to make about $14,000 per month, but can provide no proof of fantastic returns. No record of trades called within the live trading room, I asked but none were provided. Trading room needs to improve by being more transparent and providing an accurate record of trades. Until then, you should avoid.

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User Rating3.29(7 votes)

Comments Rating0(0 reviews)

Pros:Nice friendly folks. Amber Capra is a very nice customer support rep.

Cons:Trading room lacks transparency. No records of trades called inside of the live trading room are kept. Claiming average $14,000 monthly profits but can provide no proof of these fantastic returns. No trading DOM present. No trading from the charts. No account statements.

Thanks for reading today’s review of Pristine Trading

What is Pristine Trading? Pristine Trading is what I would consider one of the “legacy” trading educators. The site was founded way back in 1996 by Greg Capra and Oliver Velez, both are long time educators and salesman of various trading products. I wont go into too much detail regarding both of these men, however I can tell you that Oliver Velez is definitely someone to avoid at all costs. He has a long history of running various fraudulent trading activities, including a prop day trading firm named Element Trading. What was Element Trading? Element Trading pooled small traders together into an omnibus trading account which allowed small traders to avoid the $25k day trading rule. It worked for a short period of time, until Oliver Velez closed up shop and disappeared with the trading deposits of everyone that had contributed funds into the omnibus account. This happened back in 2012, and it was quite ugly. At about that time, Oliver Velez, with all of his fraudulent baggage broke away from Pristine Trading and started a new company named IfundTrader.com. A review of Ifundtraders will be published shortly, however lets just stay focused on Pristine.com.

Is it fair for me to mention Oliver Velez with Greg Capra? Some might say that since Oliver Velez left the firm in 2012, then everything since his departure should be considered fresh and new. However, I believe that it is important to at least include a broader history of Pristine.com so that we can bring some contrast and comparison to the new Pristine.com.

What exactly is Pristine.com offering? In a nutshell, Pristine is selling an educational package for $9,000. A quick review of the website claims that the $9,000 trading educational package is everything that a person will need to become a professional full time trader. And they also promise to continue to work with a trader until they reach their goals of becoming a successful trader. In addition to the $9,000 trading educational package, Pristine also offers a live day trading room titled “The Black Room”. This room comes at a cost of $197 a month.

The “Black Room” is considered to be the marquee trading experience, where Pristine’s very best traders display live daily stocks trading. This live daily trading experience is supposed to include entries, exits, profits, etc…and be fully trackable by the subscriber. If the $9,000 trading educational experience has any value, then we should be able to fully witness this value within the “Black” trading room. When I think of the word “Black Trading Room”, this elicits feelings of exclusivity. Like a black american express card, or a really exclusive night club, or a private portion of a topless bar where the lady is going to give me the “special show”. In short, I had really high hopes for this exclusive trading room.

In addition to the sense of exclusivity for the Black Trading Room, I have also been receiving a steady stream of marketing emails highlighting the Black Trading Room as the Trader Planet winner of the Best Live Trading Room of 2013-2014. The marketing piece claims that anyone duplicating the three moderators would have over $129,600 since January 5, 2015. Furthermore, the marketing piece claims that the Black Trading Room never risked more than $300 per trade and had only three losing weeks. Below is the marketing piece that is emailed to prospective purchasers…

Lets take a moment and put this into context…$129,600 in profits since January 5, 2015. This means that the Black Trading Room generated an average of $16,200 in profits each and every month. Pretty impressive stuff. Especially considering that they never risked more than $300 per trade, and had only three losing weeks. I am not sure how to calculate the mathematical probabilities, but this seems on the outer spectrum of believable possibilities.

Asking For Proof

One of the things that you will not find anywhere on the Pristine.com website is a record of trades called inside of the Black Trading Room. I emailed several times and requested a spreadsheet of trades, however Amber Capra could not furnish me with any records. Next, I asked for account statements that prove these magnificent performance numbers, once again I could not seem to coerce Pristine into providing any proof of these returns. I attempted to collect verifiable performance figures several times, using several different personas, emails address and identities etc. However, I was roundly ignored. The best that they could offer was that I should attend the live trading room and that all of the trades would be called live and in real time.

My last attempt at verifying the above performance came when I said that I was ready to spend my $9,000 for the premium education package. I said that my payment was contingent upon verifying the claimed performance, however I was once again ignored. Apparently, it is OK for me to spend my $9,000 and trust that my educational package is based upon the stated performance metrics. But it is not OK to for me to verify the claims of $16,000 average monthly profits. This scenario represent everything that is wrong with the trading education industry.

Inside of the Black Trading Room

The Black Trading Room is moderated primarily by Robert Shapiro and Paul Lange. It appears that they are calling trades from a charting package provided by Lightspeed Trading. At no time did I see a trading DOM present on the screen, nor did I see any trading directly on the charts. The following is a visual of what you will see inside of the trading room…

In total, we recorded 8 complete trading sessions. As I reviewed the tapes of the trading sessions, one of the things that I found to be confusing and annoying is that the moderators never did tell you how many shares they were trading per trade. For instance, they would enter a trade and if the trade would gain in value then they would declare that they were out 1/3, after it moved some more in their favor they would declare that they were out 2/3, and then finally out 100%.

Another annoying aspect would be that sometimes a trade would be initiated, and then the chat box would scroll through and new trades would be introduced, however the original trade would just be forgotten about. No mention of it. Sometimes a person from the general chat would call this into question, if the trade was a winner then the moderator would say that we are still holding. But if the trade were a loser, then the moderator would declare that he dumped it earlier.

Over the course of the nearly two weeks of recording trades, (those that we could actually record) we discovered that the Black Trading Room was basically a scratch trading experience. Equal amounts of losers to winners. But again, everything was so informal and difficult to follow our records could be off. My overall impression is that no records are being kept because there is no real trading actually happening. It appears that the moderators are just sort of winging it, fumbling through charts and making comments about this or that. No real concrete trading was happening, just slippery comments rolling through the chat box. The whole experience is to give the impression that actual trading is happening, but in reality what was happening is a lot of chat and commentary.

Pristine Needs To Improve

Based upon what I saw inside of the Black Trading Room, it would be a waste of time and money spending $197 each month for this sort of experience. Pristine needs to make some major improvements to this trading room. The first would be using a trading DOM or trading directly from the charts. This way customers can actually see what is happening. The second, and most important would be keeping accurate records of the trades being called inside of the trading room. If I am going to spend $9,000 to learn from one of these moderators, I want to make sure that he actually has a track record of positive performance.

Pristine needs to also provide some sort of proof that the stated gains of $129,600 in profits over the prior 8 months is legitimate. An account statement would suffice, and if you are considering spending your money with Pristine, then you should demand proof of these returns.

As it stands now, this is yet another trading room making some outrageous claims of massive profits, but unfortunately cannot provide even the most scant amount of evidence to substantiate these fantastic claims.

Well, thats it for today. Another crummy trading room. Please don’t forget to leave your comments below. Even the haters are cherished.

Emmett, another brilliant review of a Scam Trading Room that Trader’s Planet gives an award to. I am starting to think trading room and trading educators are like psychics where members/ customers believe without any proof what so ever. And these trading rooms use some of the same tricks to deceive their members by keeping their comments vague and flattering the member into feeling good about themselves. Physics will say things like you are an open minded person and people are like WOW that is me! The trick is everyone thinks others are not open minded but they are open… Read more »

I think that a lot of these trading rooms take the attitude that if my competitors are showing false returns, then I need to also show false returns in order to stay competitive from a marketing perspective.

As far as the regulators, they used to be much more proactive. However, the internet is so fluid and difficult to track that a site can be pulled down on a Monday and have a brand new site up on Tuesday. Complete with new names and a new pitch.